Thursday-October 22-Numbers 29-Elisabeth Elliot

Posted on

Two Views

One morning I received an article from a Christian magazine, written by a consulting physician at a well-known Christian clinic, entitled “Learning to Love Yourself.” Ironically, in the same mail came a news magazine with its cover story, “The Curse of Self-Esteem.”

I said, “Well.” (That’s a byword from my sister-in-law’s family. When they think it best not to say what they’re really thinking, but need to say something, they’ve found this useful: I said, “Well”)

The doctor’s suggestions for improving your self-esteem included these: Praise yourself. Speak up for yourself. Believe in yourself. Be proud of yourself. Express total, unconditional acceptance for where you are at this moment.

The news magazine said, “If you’re like most Americans, chances are you are at risk for low self-esteem. Sure, you felt bad at your kids’ school’s Career Day when you were the only parent who didn’t own his own company. But unless your family psychometrician had ministered a Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory or the Kaplan Self-Derogation Scale you probably never imagined that a negative self-image might be holding you back in life. You just thought you were no good.

“But now you know that there are no bad people, only people who think badly of themselves.”

“Aha,” said I.

Then followed a few pithy quotes. Mark Twain: “Deep down in his heart no man much respects himself.” Leo Tolstoy: “I am always with myself and it is I who am my tormentor.” Goethe: “I do not know myself and God forbid that I should.” And H.L. Mencken: “Self-respect—the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.”

To all of which I said, “Hear, hear.”

As I paused and pondered I thought of the boy king Uzziah who, taking the throne at sixteen, made such a good start at obeying God and was “greatly helped until he became powerful. . . . His pride led to his downfall. He was unfaithful to the Lord his God,” (2 Chronicles 26:15-16, NIV) and died a leper, excluded from the temple of the Lord. It was at the time of that ignominious death that the prophet Isaiah received his commission from God, for which he was prepared first by a vision of the Lord Himself, high and exalted. The very doorposts shook at the sound of the voices of the seraphim, “Holy, holy, holy,” and the prophet, in that awful revelation of the holiness of God, was given an instant and terrible self-revelation which wrenched from him the cry, “Woe is me!. . . I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips. . .and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty” (Isaiah 6:5, NIV).

That self of which the conscious image (of an honest man) is not merely “low” or “poor” but twisted, maimed, tortured, ruined—can it find wholeness and healing merely by sweet affirmation? It took fire from God’s altar to cleanse Isaiah’s lips. It took the total immolation of the Lamb to take away the sin of the world. Is the cross now obsolete?

“Beware of false prophets,” Jesus warned (Matthew 7:15). “If anyone wants to follow in my footsteps he must give up all right to himself, take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24, PHILLIPS). Can we manage to juggle the building of a stronger self-image while we fulfill those three conditions of discipleship?

“Whoever cares for his own safety is lost; but if a man will let himself be lost for My sake, he will find his true self” (Matthew 16:25, NEB). Who can forget about his own safety and allow himself to be lost while at one and the same time striving to build a stronger self-image? Sounds like a serious conflict of interest, doesn’t it?

I know of nothing more agitating to the soul, nothing that so unsettles and disquiets, as the contemplation of the self. If I succeed in improving my self-image by minimizing my faults, I may find the peace that the world can give, but I will end up in spiritual turmoil. The peace of the penitent spirit is “very low in its own eyes, and therefore not unsettled” (Janet Erskine Stuart).

Those who follow the Lamb leave self behind, and “put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness” (Ephesians 4:24, NIV).